This proposal concerns how adults and children represent objects in the visual world, and how these representations affect categorization, inference, and memory. The first project will investigate visual heuristics, in particular, straightening, rotation and alignment, helpful devices in overcoming inevitable memory overload, but also yielding distortions and incorrect inferences. Distortions are particularly apparent in memory for maps, which have importance in our everyday lives. The second project will investigate a developmental shift in children's internal representations, from greater reliance on perceptually salient aspects of the world to greater reliance on conceptual, functionally significant aspects of the world. The effects of this shift of emphasis on different kinds of content is predicted to have broad effects that will be investigated in children's grouping, memory and retrieval.